Getting relevant and useful health information has been a great concern for many people. Nearly half of the adults spending time on-line have visited health-related sites. Furthermore, some of the most desired types of on-line health information are “information from my doctors' office” or from “national medical experts”. This comes as no surprise since according to a most recent analysis of the health care system in a prestigious US medical journal, “in one survey, half of the patients reported having left their physician's office not knowing what they had been told or what they were supposed to do”.
However, health or medical information is notoriously complex and difficult to evaluate for non-MD individuals. Finding the proper and precisely relevant information in the myriad of medical web sites is a difficult and time-intensive process. Often, it simply cannot be successfully achieved since the patient does not understand well enough the condition, and thus even less so how to formulate queries for searching in various search engines and web sites.
There are more than 10,000 medical or health-related web sites on the web at the present time, and health care is a rapidly growing Internet content area. These web sites can be generally classified or categorized as follows based upon the types of information that they provide:
Medical Information Content Providers: these sites are broad scope or specialized repositories of medical information.
Pharmaceutical Information Content Providers: these sites are similar to the above but focused on drug information.
E-commerce: on-line drugstores are predominant in this category, adding their operations to the traditional physician/prescription/drugstore relation. This category also includes companies that sell medical equipment or health insurance policies.
Health Management Companies: these companies provide tools to help customers manage complex or chronic diseases such as diabetes or other health conditions.
Health-Benefit Information: this category entails essentially information sites from managed care organizations, providing a mix of news and access to benefits descriptions and billings for members.
Health Care Business Infrastructure: these companies provide Internet-based software solutions to increase the internal productivity of health care organizations.
The combination of these offerings and services makes it clear that the health care industry is on the verge of an information-based revolution that will have profound consequences. However, medicine is not trivial and “one thing to keep in mind when you're researching information online is that your computer doesn't have an M.D.” [C|net, 1999]. It has already become critical to enhance and yet simplify the health care consumer's experience with new and innovative services that are targeted, personalized and that can become an integral part of health care delivery.
Patients or health care consumers thrive to become more informed and empowered with relevant information. One of the types of information they desire the most is “information from my own doctor's office” [JAMA, Editorial, Digital Doctoring, Oct. 21, 1998], as well as information from national medical experts [Cyber Dialogue/FIND/SVP, 1998]. Indeed, the health care system, under considerable economic pressures that are unlikely to disappear anytime soon, has transformed the physician-patient relationship.
In general, interactions with physicians are shorter. Diagnoses are often sent directly to the managed care organization and the patient receives no clear information about his or her condition, problem, or other aspects of his or her heath. Also, the prescription can be sent directly to the drugstore, on-line or not. This often leaves the patient with barely any notion of what the diagnosis is and how to deal with it, including finding further information about it. “In one study, half of the patients reported having left their physician's office not knowing what they had been told or what they were supposed to do.” [The American Health Care System, T. Bodenheimer, New England Journal of Medicine, Feb. 18, 1999]. Educating the patient is a critical need. Not only “well-informed patients are often healthier patients” [Medical Economics, Why You Should Welcome the New Assertive Patient, September 1997], but “the use of Internet-based health information leads to better health care” [Managed Health Care, G. Moore].
Pediatrics and Women's′ Health, for example, are two major topics on which medical information is sought on-line. “In 1998, 27% of adults with children said they go online in search of children's health content, up from 15% of parents the previous year” [Cyber Dialogue, Inc., The Health Care Industry in Transition, 1998]. In the same year, women constituted 46% of all adults on-line and Women's Health has been a major topic online for 31% of all online users.
However, in spite of the great number of health-related web sites available on the Internet, it is still very difficult to obtain relevant, useful and personalized health information on the Internet for various reasons, some of which are mentioned below:
There is a very large number of sites from which to retrieve information. The patients or healthcare consumers often do not know which sites would be good or relevant for their informational purposes.
The sites are not targeted enough. “The biggest obstacle you're likely to face online is information overload.” [Fortune, Where to Find Medical Advice on the Web, Mar. 17, 1997]. There is indeed too much information, most often poorly organized or presented. The patients or consumers are required to perform complicated searches and then need to refine searches and use filters in order to reach the desired information, if any. These search mechanisms also often require the users to use the correct terminology for searching as well the minimal skills to formulate more complex queries. The patients or healthcare consumers often do not have the time to search for information. They also do not have the time to filter or eliminate irrelevant or extraneous information from a vast amount of information available on the Web.
Sites are very uneven in quality or in organization, making them more difficult to use. Typical search interfaces may be difficult to use and presentation of search results may not be well organized to enable the average users to select relevant information for their purposes.
In short, browsing the web for medical or health-related information is actually far from being a simple task. It requires a significant amount of time and familiarity with various jargons, terminology, synonyms and other idiosyncrasies and complex issues of the health care field. For most health care consumers, it is an out-of-context and laborious process.
Accordingly, there exists a need for the health care consumers to efficiently and effectively locate and obtain relevant, useful and personalized health-related or medical information without laborious and intensive searching through various web sites on the Internet.